Dave, all excellent suggestions, and if it were up to me I'd definitely replace boards with something modern and probably opensource. I'm a big fan of 'Vanilla' for creating messageboards, and some of the WP extensions are getting better too. Alas, it's not up to me, and we've also had comments from lots of boards users along the lines of 'please don't fix what is not broken', 'we love our boards just the way they are' and 'change is not good'. Those kinds of sentiments don't really help to spearhead any change.

I'll admit that I like the boards the way they are.

I'll also admit that some of the other versions have some interesting capabilities that we are lacking.

But I've noticed that on the other systems posts are likely to be much shorter, and mush less thoughtful. Very often there's nothing more than a quick comment, and if a post extends to a full paragraph it's a rare event.

In addition, the problem of dealing with the archives seems insurmountable, and I'm really, really, reallly tired of people (people who have often been with the Fool for only a year or so) saying, "oh, no one looks at the older posts. We don't need them, get rid of everything before last year."

People do use them. They often refer back to them. When people have reached some sort of successful conclusion, paying down debts, for example, they will often refer back to their first post. On other boards people will go back and say, "so and so wrote a really terrific post on that subject. Here's a link."

So like it or not, the archives would have to be upgraded to work with whatever software was purchased.